The Three Pillars of Internet Marketing

Every business endeavor needs a solid base upon which to build revenue. Internet Marketing is no different. It is becoming more and more apparent that you need the following three pillars of internet marketing in order to build your business, your brand, and your buzz.

Content

Referrals

Buzz

First up is awesome content. And by content, I mean your website, posts and pages you create, your internal linking structure, onpage SEO, images, and everything else you can think of. Bottom line: Create great content that people want to consume. It will be found in the search engines, and once that happens, #2 and #3 will naturally follow. You can coax it along a little bit, too.

Do your keyword research. Think of how your potential customers might go looking for what you offer. Then supply it to them.

Content is easy. Check out the WordPress SEO cheat sheet I put up in the Members’ area under Extras (if you’re not a member, sign up to the free newsletter to get it).

Second is referrals. You want backlinks from high-authority sites. Think CNN, Wikipedia.org, and .edu sites, for example. You also want referrals (backlinks) from relevant websites in your area. If you’re an author, for example, you want review sites linking back to your website.

Third is buzz. You have to get people talking about your website. Search is now being affected–GREATLY–by social media sites, as well it should. If people are talking about you on the social networks like Digg, Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and twitter, you’re becoming more and more important. You are affecting them.

And that’s a good great thing.

You may think that #2 and #3 are one in the same. They’re not. Here’s the difference. Referrals really are real websites run by real people who like your site enough to stake their reputation to make a referral about you. They are purposely putting up a link back to your site from theirs. There is an implicit recommendation in that.

Buzz is still about getting people back to your site. But the buzz comes from websites that are generally run from automated and/or user-generated websites. Think Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

So, content, referrals, and buzz.

By the way, these three pillars of internet marketing can be applied to any business. Think about that for a moment: Your “content” is your expertise. It’s what you know. People will pay you for your knowledge, experience, and expertise.

Second, you need referrals from trusted sources in any business to help spread the word about your business.

Third, you need to build buzz. People need to talk about you. You can help them help you by making it easy for them to share. Better yet, give them an incentive to do so (affiliate marketing is a great way).

I hope you can see how important these three pillars of internet marketing are.